It is that time of the year again & Christmas is coming! Myself and the little man had some spare time today so we decided to head up to Laura Lynn to buy our Christmas tree. This year is different as we are challenging ourselves to bring the tree home using the cargo bike.

Preparing the Cargo Bike

We normally have the rain cover on the cargo bike, not so much for the rain but it is a great protection against wind & these days against the cold. So today I have wrapped up the little passenger well & it was a lovely sunny day so we did not need a rain cover.

I decided to leave the rain cover bars in place just in case I needed to secure the Christmas tree somehow to the bike. In the end that was not necessary. The very helpful gent at Laura Lynn helped secure the tree to the cargo bike using some rope:

Room for Christmas Tree & Passenger

The Babboe Big cargo bike is quite a decent size. We bought a fairly decent sized tree, probably close to 1.7m (5.5ft). I could fit the little man comfortably into the bicycle & the tree was very secure. We also had a few bits and bobs inside the bike such as lose bags which I could fit alongside the passenger & tree! As you can see from the photograph above, the tree stuck out quite a bit in the front but ultimately it did not cause any de-stabilisation or cause an issue controlling the bicycle.

Cycling home

To get from Laura Lynn to our house is approximately 4km so roughly a 15-20 minute ride by cargo bike. The journey was perfectly fine, there was no instability. The Babboe Big is much more controllable the heavier it is, so having the Christmas tree is fine. Getting home is a mix of tricky poor cycle lane surfaces along the Leopardstown Road & a need to join with 3 lanes of car traffic to allow me to turn right across the N11 if you are familiar with this part of the world. Nothing too stressful once you are familiar with the territory. Overall the cargo bike handled fine, I just needed to be mindful that the tree is sticking out in the front so not to get too close to cars where we were mixing on the road.

Conclusion

I now know what to expect & I would do this again. It is important that you have some rope to secure the tree into the bike. If you plan on buying a larger tree, you might want to ditch the passenger to make more space.

Happy Christmas!